The everyday contributions of a multi-disciplinary writer and researcher to his own projects

Introduction to Sunnyvale Psychochronography, Composing, 03/04/2016

The Sunnyvale community is all here.

The Trailer Park Boys have been a part of my life ever since the show’s first episodes ran on the Canadian Showcase network in 2002. That’s true for a lot of people in Canada. Its creators and actors became stars, definitely.

But more than that, Trailer Park Boys became a significant part of Canadian culture, the fabric of what it means to be a Canadian in the 21st century. I know it sounds pretentious to say this of a surreal faux-documentary show about small-time criminals and trailer trash in Nova Scotia. But it's true. That's what’s kind of fascinating and great about Canada.

This is an auspicious time to begin an exploration of Trailer Park Boys. The show’s tenth season has just dropped on Netflix, its new home. More infamously, Mike Smith – Bubbles – has been arrested for misdemeanour assault in Los Angeles, just as Lucy DeCoutere goes public about her decision to leave Sunnyvale permanently.

DeCoutere does so in a horrible context as well. She has just been humiliated across Western media – and especially in the Canadian media and arts community – with the disaster of her testimony in the Jian Ghomeshi sexual assault trial.

It wouldn’t be remiss to say in this context that a time has come for taking stock of what Trailer Park Boys and Sunnyvale mean for the Canadian cultural psyche. You’ll notice that I refer to the town of Sunnyvale itself, beyond the show itself.

Psychochronography – and its older sister psychogeography – is about tracing the evolution of an organism of Ideaspace in all its material manifestations. That organism is the town of Sunnyvale itself, a living, vibrant community in the heartland of one of the founding promises of Canada.

This project, which I call Sunnyvale Psychochronography, will describe Sunnyvale’s culture one episode, movie, stage tour, webcast and bizarre intrusion into real Canadian life at a time. It will explore, now that Sunnyvale is a permanent part of Canada’s geography, how it came to exist, and why its existence means that it has always been here.

My own journey through Sunnyvale will begin with the present, an episode-by-episode journey through the latest season of Trailer Park Boys, the tenth. From there, I return to the beginning – Mike Clattenburg’s 1999 no-budget film Trailer Park Boys.

Then the series proper begins in 2001, and I plan on covering the different movies, live tours and shows, and important concurrent events in Canadian culture at the time. Because all psychochronographies involve their own creation as an analytic framework, my own experiences of seeing live performances and casually running into John Paul Tremblay and Rob Wells will be part of the story as well.

Of course, I wouldn’t have started this project if I hadn’t been able to conceive of it. And for that, I have to thank the original reviver of psychochronography, Phil Sandifer. As well, Josh Marsfelder at Vaka Rangi deserves thanks. Their own projects – Sandifer’s TARDIS Eruditorum about Doctor Who and Marsfelder’s Vaka Rangi about Star Trek – are fantastic models for my own amble through Sunnyvale.

Sunnyvale is more than just a place – it's a peculiarly Canadian utopia. A community in constant revolt against authority and authoritarians, the strongest desire for freedom in Canada’s culture. Sunnyvale is a place without prejudice – a white man can be black, pansexuality and all spectrums of gender identity are accepted as a fact of life.